COLDFUSION LESSONS - to prepare for CF MX

[skierbit]

Mabey i am just blind, but I cant seem to find it. I have searched for like a half hour! Can anyone paste a link for me? (Sorry for the trouble)

[howco]

Its actually really hard to find it on microsofts site real hard as a matter of fact I cant find it either. I got it off a NT update disk.

Are you using windows XP if you are it wont work with XP.

A easier soulution would be to use apache web server. It works on XP as well as 98. And it is easy to find.

http://www.apache.com

[AndrewMuller]

Originally posted by roele
And why should we use the expensive CF when PHP is free and work's with Flash too

Really this whole "PHP & ASP rocks because they're free" is both tiresome and shows a great degree of naiveté.

Because it's such a rapid development environment ColdFusion delivers a far greater ROI than any of the others and is less costly to deploy a site with if you actually include your labour costs and come up with a whole, or do you guys work for free.

I've said it here on this list before and the PHP/ASP zealots have replied without reading what I've said, well see if you can read and digest this quote from another list that I'm on (the prices quoted are in Australian dollars):

"Hmm, one might say "false economy, thy name is ASP". Here's why:

1. Labour
Labour easily makes up over 90% of IT project costs. Given this you'd think that any investment that saves on labour is a good idea. $4,000 is about 7 days of a programmer's time at $70/hour. Say writing a (standard database driven) site in CF only takes 65% of the time of writing an ASP site (I've been on large projects using both, I think this is a fair comparison.) Then every hour your boss spends $25 per programmer more than he needs to. Add debugging to that - CF is sooo much easier than ASP to debug, say 40% of the time it takes to debug an ASP cript. That's $40 per hour per programmer more than he needs to spend. Say coding/debugging is 60/40, then overall that's $31 per hour more than necessary - at this rate CF Pro would pay for itself in 16 days, which is a very short project. Every hour after that is another $31 out the cash hose. Perhaps your boss could imagine a 50 cent piece plunking into a bucket every minute for every programmer working on an ASP site.

2. Scalability
To get a real fault-tolerant server box with Windows NT or 2K installed could cost $30,000. Now assume same site was written in CF, total cost $34,000. Say it could only handle twice as many requests (and that is pretty pessimistic given the cached precompiled code vs. interpreted source, cached queries, multiple request threads vs. in-process dll and other stuff). To get the same performance from the ASP site would cost $26,000 more (not counting the clustering software costs - and that MS cluster stuff is expensive). "But ASP is FREEEE..." they cry. ASP may be free, but the hardware and O/S tied up running your inefficient ASP server is anything but! (Conspiracy theory #4982: this means more O/S and CPU sales for Wintel...)

3. Functionality
There are things you can do out of the box in CF that cost additional money to do in ASP. This includes basic functionality such as file uploads, web and ftp requests and full text indexing. For these you need to make a credit-card trip to serverobjects.com or purchase MS SiteServer or CommerceServer. There are even things you can do in CF that you can't pay money to do in ASP. These include things such as thisTag.generatedContent (the basis of all sorts of killer caching capabilities), connecting to a Java object (hey, the compiler for Java is free - where is the free compiler for COM objects?), keeping the bulk of your code outside wwwroot or sitting a designer in front of an editor and say "go for it - just don't modify the tags starting with CF".

4. Cross Platform
Several of my support clients are working on lucrative projects for banks and telcos who's standard server operating environment is Solaris or HP-UX.
Too bad if you're using ASP bidding against a Cold Fusion development house. And if you're worried about Money, Cold Fusion runs really nicely on Linux, an O/S (you guessed it) that's FREE!

I feel a deep frustration when I hear people dismissing Cold Fusion out of hand because it costs money. It's the same pain you'd get watching someone work with a blunt plane. All that precious, expensive developer energy going to waste. Geez, if software cost is such an issue, use CF Express. IT'S FREE and all of you courageous souls who continue to insist on using Access as a production database won't notice the missing features anyway. Run it on Linux and you wont even have to pay for the O/S. That's a few $1,000 cheaper than an ASP solution!

Why do we focus so much on the cost of the server software? Why not focus instead on the cost of the network card, the O/S, the RAID array, the computer power supply? One answer is that our clients don't question these things because they assume that as professionals we know what we're doing, and that we've picked the components necessary to do a good job. More than any of these components the programming language and web application server directly affect the web programmer's ability to be effective and do a good job. So this principal should apply doubly so when you choose which application server to use."

Andrew

There's no such thing as a free lunch...

[aashu.com]

hi guyz,

i think nusphere is good one ... works fine with linux, windows, xp all ...

also come with mysql, php, perl, apache and phpmyadmin ...

[AndrewMuller]

<b>Free ColdFusion</b>

As I quoted in my last posting, there's a free version of ColdFusion, that's right 100% free.

It's called ColdFusion Express and is available for both Linux & Windows platforms.

That means that like my last posting said, you Linux junkies can build and serve up a site that costs you nothing except for your hardware and labor costs, that's free right?

Licensing allows you to develop and deploy for nothing, guilt free…

Remember, ColdFusion requires less code than either ASP, PHP or JSP to develop, that means you’re going to save yourself development time.

This is a feature limited version, but it has enough in it to allow you to query a database and dynamically publish your query’s results.

Find out more about system requirements here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/c...ss_sysreq.html

Download link here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/c...r_express.html

Here's the manual on how to develop applications with it: http://www.macromedia.com/v1/documen...expressdwa.pdf

If you want to develop applications to run on the full version of ColdFusion you can always get hold of a copy of the trial verison of ColdFusion, it becomes a unlimited use developers edition after the 30 day trial period, the difference - you can still run it locally on your machine, you just can serve up pages to the rest of the world.

Developer edition details here: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia.../free_cf5.html

Download trial/developer edition here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/c...cf_server.html

If you haven't read some of Macromedias press releases regarding Flash MX you should, here's something that no one on this board seems to picked up, unless you're already under NDA

"Macromedia ColdFusion MX, which can be used in conjunction with Microsoft .NET, Java application servers, and web services, will provide developers with the fastest and easiest way to create rich applications with Macromedia Flash MX. In addition, developers will be able to use a new server gateway technology to build Macromedia Flash applications that work directly with leading application servers and web services."

ColdFusion MX is currently in beta, called Neo, and anyone can apply to join the beta here: http://www.macromedia.com/go/neobetaapply

Andrew

[skierbit]

I am serious, I must be retarded. I have tried for hours to get a server. I looked forever on the MS site for the ISS server. Cant find it. Looked for ever on the apache FTP sites and downloaded like every file. Cant get any of them to work. Can anyone please sent a link my way to download a server?

[AndrewMuller]

Skierbit

In theory you should be able to use WebSite (http://website.deerfield.com/) or Apache (http://www.apache.org), otherwise with regards to IIS/PWS - which version of Windows are you using?

Andrew

[skierbit]

Windows XP

[AndrewMuller]

Skierbit

I'm using Win2K and am not too familiar with XP, I just went and had a quick search on http://groups.google.com to see what I could find. This is probably the best online resource as it is a search engine for news groups and if it's been discussed anywhere your topic will come back with a result.

This thread: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...Bxp%2522%2Biis tells me that IIS only comes with Windows XP Pro, if that's not your version the thread mentions a walkaround: http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/020118.htm but without recommendation.

Your best bet might be persisting with Apache, but you could follow up with what's on the two links I've provided or do a bit more research on groups.google.com, there's even Flash stuff there.

Good luck

Andrew
[Edited by AndrewMuller on 03-29-2002 at 01:10 PM]

[thestratman]

Someone said that IIS doesnt work with XP. I believe that is incorrect. If you are running XP Professional you can use IIS (I am pretty sure). Plus you dont need to download IIS. You can use Cold Fusion with Personal Web Server which is part of Windows. Check you windows help files for Personal Web Server and it will guide you through the steps for installing it, if it is not already installed.

[Twister]

I cant get a variable out of flash and into a URL for CF. Please help me.

I have a variable called userid that gets sent from a link and into flash. It makes it in ok. But on the way out it wont work.

Here is my code.

getURL("thanks.cfm?attending=maybe&userid=" + userid);

All's i end up with in the url is everything in quotes. Why won't it turn userid into what it actually is.

By the way. userid=thomas

Thanks
Twister

[pranktv]

Great work on the banner I have been looking for something like that for some time now, not a huge page of info, but tons of info about the user! Is there any way I could get a copy from ya? email: davidhowe@onebox.com

[Subway]

Originally posted by pranktv
Great work on the banner I have been looking for something like that for some time now, not a huge page of info, but tons of info about the user! Is there any way I could get a copy from ya? email: davidhowe@onebox.com

I've sent you a mail.

For everyone else: http://www.zh-webdesign.ch/zoa/fk_banner4.zip

Fredi

[skierbit]

Ok, I have read all about this on Microsoft website and what not, but I am really seriously having problems with this subject. I am on Win XP Pro and I still dont have Personal Web Server with IIS 5.1 . How do I install this on my system. I have looked all over MS's site but I just cant find it. Thanks to all those that have helped me out and sorry for my incompetence with a simple download.

[howco]

personal web server is hard to find on microsofts site. You however might allready have a copy on a CD that you might have.

on the windows 98 disk it is here

\add-ons\pws\setup.exe

Also it is on several service pack updates for NT. The Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack cd has a copy of pws on it allthough it is actually a scaled down iis. Microsoft used to have the option pack for download but the only one I can seem to find on the site is service pack 5

however once agian you dont have to use pws to set up a webserver on your xp machine. I had serious trouble getting pws working on xp and decided to use apache.

download this

http://www.trantech-inc.com/cf/ApacheCFStuff.zip

this is a package that contains everything you need to set up apache on xp and get cold fusion to work with it. I don't know jack about servers and was able to get it going in under ten minutes.

[skierbit]

Thanks a million!

[sonwah]

howco, great link,
do you know if that will work on Win2k too?
I know jack about servers too

[howco]

Ive no idea if it will work on win2k, but I dont see why it would not.

[skierbit]

Originally posted by sonwah
howco, great link,
do you know if that will work on Win2k too?
I know jack about servers too

From the Read Me file

Apache
Version 1.3 (and up)

What is it?
-----------

Apache is an HTTP server, originally designed for Unix systems. This
is the version of Apache for Microsoft Windows 2000, NT, 98, and 95
systems. Like the Unix version, it includes many frequently
requested new features, and has an API that allows it to be extended
to meet users' needs more easily. It also allows limited support for
ISAPI extensions.

[aashu.com]

hi,

i am using XP with APACHE, PHP, Perl, MySQL installed on it. so is it possible to run CF on this environment?

i download the zip file you posted over here ....

APACHE and Mysql are running as Service ...

thanks in advance ..